On May 11, 2011, at 3:07 PM, David Hyatt wrote:
>
> One thing that's very unclear to me is how regions are sized. I am not convinced that this can be hand-waved away as some other spec's problem. For example, if a positioned element that is acting as a region has no height or width specified, how wide is it? How tall is it? What is the intrinsic width of such an element? I see the same issue occurring for grid-cells or flex-boxes as well. Unless you fix the width of the region prior to flowing content into it, there are a lot of layout questions to answer.
Just to elaborate on this further, I am specifically talking about layouts like the automatic table layout algorithm where there is a notion of a minimum preferred width (break at every opportunity) and a maximum preferred width (never break). I don't understand how you could possibly calculate those values for regions, since you don't know beforehand what content will actually be in the region. I'm going to make a simplifying suggestion: the preferred widths of a region are computed as though the region has no content.
In effect this would mean that for objects like table cells and positioned elements, you would need to either fix the width or specify a minimum width if you don't want the content to just push to the next region. I think this is pretty reasonable and can't really think of any better way to do it. (Using all of the content is another possibility, but then you'd just be too wide all the time.)
dave
(hyatt@apple.com)